Hollywood chases money in science of tears
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Turkey’s new president says his country will only approve of a deal to reunify Cyprus if it enshrines breakaway Turkish Cypriots as equal partners in a federation with the internationally recognised Greek Cypriot government. Cyprus was split in 1974 when Turkey invaded after a coup by supporters of uniting the island with Greece. A Turkish Cypriot declaration of independence is recognised only by Turkey, which maintains 35,000 troops there. Greek Cypriots oppose a deal putting the breakaway administration on an equal footing with the government because they say it would legitimise something created through the force of arms. AP to The Notebook, and noted which parts of their brains ‘‘lit up’’ at key moments.
They also filmed men sobbing more discreetly when in the company of other men than they did with women.
Cues include music that swells, locked gazes and that perfect moment for women when men expose their vulnerability – as in the film Jerry Maguire, when an apologetic Tom Cruise is told ‘‘You had me at ‘hello’.’’
However, a 2008 report by Stanford determines that such scenes cannot last longer than 30 seconds, because if they do they are at risk of toppling into parody.
Life-reflecting moments, such as a final dance between a father and his daughter, the bride, can also be relied upon to make an audience weep.
Men, too, can be reduced to tears in the dark, according to research published by Uri Hasson, a psychologist at Princeton.
He said men grow misty-eyed about
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This is one of the archaeological pieces returned to Colombia from Spain. The 691 pieces, including 3000-yearold ceramics, were seized in 2003 in a drugtrafficking and money-laundering case. Hollywood studios have known there is money in tears since Walt Disney killed Bambi’s mother in 1942. Now they are using science to make people who love to cry at the movies very happy.
By manipulating an array of tricks known as ‘‘psychocinematics’’ – or what scriptwriters call ‘‘telling a good story’’ – they aim to get multiplexes ringing to the sound of teenage sobs.
After the summer success of The Fault in Our Stars, about two teenage cancer victims finding romance, studios are unleashing a flood of ‘‘weepies’’ and are turning to a younger generation of actresses.
As female film-goers eclipse teenage boys, who prefer to stay at home playing video games, it has never been so rewarding to make girls cry .
One weepie will be released every month over the next year, starting this weekend with the US$11 million If I Stay, a story about a cello prodigy marooned in a coma after a car accident.
The winsome teenager with the impossibly supportive boyfriend is played by Chloe Grace Moretz, 17, last seen as a foul-mouthed action hero in the two Kick-Ass films.
Ansel Elgort, the male lead of The Fault in Our Stars, said he was shocked when people came up to him and started crying.
He turned down roles in two other ‘‘Kleenex jobs’’, This Is Where I Leave You and The Skeleton Twins – both about families torn apart by death – but may provoke tears again in Flowers for Algernon, in which a simple man is given IQ-boosting drugs . . . but at terrible cost. It has been filmed twice before, but the new version of the book that sold 5 million copies has been made using the science of emotional cues developed over six years at Stanford and Princeton universities, which both have strong links with Hollywood.
They wired-up people watching a variety of past weepies, from The Champ father-and-son scenes – one has been written into This Is Where I Leave You, dying athletes and heroic deaths, as in the film Saving Private Ryan.
Hasson’s research suggests that Tom Hanks makes more men cry than anyone else. Hanks inserted his own line into Sleepless in Seattle, where he admits crying at the end of The Dirty Dozen, a classic war movie.
Researchers also noticed that more men than women dabbed their eyes when Hanks broke down at the end of his ordeal in last year’s Oscar-nominated movie Captain Phillips.
‘‘It’s about pacing the cues for the genders,’’ said a consultant on that movie.
‘‘We noticed that women will cry most freely halfway through the film, while men let go at the end. Except on the Pixar movie Up, whose first 12 minutes relate the story of a happy marriage, at which everyone bawls their eyes out right away.’’